The Best Damn RC Thread

also adding my lists of questions to guide you in your passage analysis.

slow down your reading. i know it's counterintuitive, but bear with me just for now.

look at each paragraph as an LR stimulus and analyze accordingly. what is the conclusion? any principles? what evidence (premises) is presented? any sub-conclusions? does it agree or disagree with the main point?any counter arguments? how are they supported (premises/evidence?)?does the author agree with the counter argument? any words that tell us what the author agrees with? disagrees?make particular note of compare and contrast of examples. the more abstruse, the more likely it will be tested.

now tie the paragraphs together: what is the passage as a whole trying to persuade us to understand and believe? did a countervailing view get introduced? how? how was it dismissed?what does the author agree with?

write a brief synopsis of the main idea of each paragraph. just a few words. you can do this next to the paragraphs or in a table.

mark shifts in tone, argument, and comparison and contrasting of evidence/premises or theories.

the first post in this thread was really helpful, but also really condescending. And I say that as a dude who's pretty condescending himself.

Liz's advice, as it tends to be, is tops!

RC passages tend to be summarizable in about 5 sentences (roughly one per paragraph, two for some of those long paragraphs). There are generally at least 5 or 6 questions you can get right if you can get at those 5 sentences. This leaves 1 or 2 questions where you really have to dig and infer.

Also, I'll throw in my somewhat controversial approach. If you have the time to really get into and absorb everything you're reading and still make it through the passage, my advice is to do that. If not, though, as most of us are not, I have no trouble advocating a "read it all pretty quickly, if you miss something, no biggie" approach. My reasoning for this is that the questions tend to be worded by people who are experts at tricking prospective lawyers. The passages, however, are not. They're written by people who want to communicate complex things as clearly as possible. You can always go back to the passages later, but you GOTTA spend time understanding exactly what the question is going for. You have to look for the phantom "s" in a RC answer that makes it wrong, or the language that's just too extreme. This is where most people have their problems. The questions. So shirkin' a little on the passage in favor of really understanding the questions might be a really good strategy, especially for people who aren't time managing as well as they could be.

One guide I read advised reading the most interesting/easiest passage first. And leaving the Law related passage last. Confirm? Deny?

Leave it to some guide to hand out the worst advice on this thread. Here are just the first three things I found wrong with this idea.

1. Wouldn't categorizing the passages as easy or interesting entail having to read them?2. What happens if you find the law related passage to be the easiest or most interesting? I mean, a) it's pretty subjective, and b)this is, after all, a test for future lawyers.3. In a 35 minute test, any time spent analyzing which ones are easier before even diving in to the passage is, by definition, wasted time. You're going to have to read them all if you want a good score. Take 'em as they come.